Delayed Obedience Is Disobedience

“Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices

    as much as in obeying the Lord?

To obey is better than sacrifice,

    and to heed is better than the fat of rams.”

– 1 Samuel 15:22

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A pile of odds and ends, the leavings of the day, sit at the base of our stairs like a pile of rubble after a domestic avalanche of orphaned shoes, Hot Wheels, and broken pieces of chalk. This is the “go back” pile: the pile of items designated to be returned upstairs after I have whisked them off the floor in a speed clean session inspired by the Tasmanian Devil. 

The pile sits silently mocking me as I give it a good, long stare. This is the pile my daughter is assigned to rehome at the end of every day. At eight, she is fairly dependable, normally thrives on the thrill of completing her chores checklist, and in her more generous moments, even does extra chores just to make me smile. In fact, today is one of those days. She has cleared the toys off the living room floor, fluffed the couch pillows, and folded laundry – all unbidden. The one thing she hasn’t done is clear the pile from the bottom of the stairs. 

The one thing I asked her to do. 

And I can’t even be frustrated because when I think to myself, “She did everything except what I asked her to do,” somewhere in the back of my mind is a niggling voice that whispers, 

Just like you.

It’s not an angry voice. It’s merely stating a fact, one I know at this moment to be true. 

I am going to deviate from my norm here and share something personal, and that’s actually not a joke, because although I am always sharing personal stories in these reflections, they are always meant to point the listener to God. They are stories about me, but they aren’t really about me. 

This little insight I’m about to share is more narrowly directed at me, but I want to share with you because some of you might be joining us for the first time as listeners from my other podcast and Substack newsletter, Brave New Us, which I recently wrapped production on despite it finally gaining traction after four years of stop-and-go labor. Why leave now, after 16,000 YouTube views, 13,000 podcast downloads, and 4,000 substack subscribers. Why abandon ship?

I might be a bit dense, but began to sense that this was one of the many chores God did not ask me to do. 

It was beautiful. It was important. It feels unfinished and it is honestly still a project I’d like to pick and continue – one day. 

But that pile on the stairs hit me like a ton of bricks. 

I had a queue of reflections in my mind that was two years long. For two years, I had been collecting the stories for this podcast for someday. In the meantime, I busied myself freelance writing, drafting book proposals, expanding my newsletter offerings, and taking the podcast to YouTube. 

Someone had once told me that the bioethics “stuff” was like my job, and the Mama Prays stuff was like my hobby. And somewhere in there, I started to believe that, and to behave accordingly. I had forgotten the burning in my heart when I read the words of John Paul II: 

“Do you think that there can be anything greater than to bring Jesus to people and people to Jesus?” 

And on the one hand, that is the call of every Christian. In a particular way, that is the call of mothers (and fathers for that matter), for the children each of us are given. But when I read those words, I felt a tug on my heart to share the stories I’d been hoarding in my head since one very trying day at Mass. 

It was not the day I spoke about two episodes ago –  we have a lot of trying days at Mass. 

No, this was the day when my 2-year-old decided to make a break for it in response to his own personal altar call. The entire assembly gasped as my son ran the length of the right side of the church up the wheelchair ramp to the elevated stage on which sat the altar. I walked as swiftly as I could with a baby strapped to my chest to head him off before he got to where he could do some real damage. If this was a more artsy parish, his antics might have passed for a skit, because the gospel that day was - I kid you not - the parable of the lost son. 

It doesn’t end there. Upon retrieving my son from his mad dash up the aisle, I yanked him outside for some cool down time. For me.

Now, he is what some parents affectionately call a “runner,” and has no sense of anxiety about being far from us. We have since procured a tracking device that he wears around his wrist to keep tabs on our little runaway, but that day, we were just one the verge of discovering the need. 

I let him walk a bit ahead of me on the path outside of the church. He took these gains as a sign to run faster and farther, and my heart stopped when he rounded the corner nearest the street. I ran full-on to catch up, but by the time I made it around the corner, he was out of sight. I will spare you the terror of the moments that followed; I eventually found him hiding on a bench in an alcove outside the adoration chapel. 

And as I walked back to my pew after receiving communion that day, I felt that tug on my heart. This was what I was supposed to do: share these stories with you, share the ways God is touching my heart through my children. How I lost my son on the parable of the Lost Son. I knew my calling. 

And so naturally, I folded the laundry and fluffed the pillows. 

Of course, we all do this at times. A thing doesn’t have to be wrong for it to be sinful – as long as it's done at the wrong time, in the wrong way, in the wrong amount, with the wrong person, etc. Who hasn’t scrolled social media when you should have been doing something else? Who hasn’t procrastinated or left something important undone? 

And this is where I was getting it wrong. Because it isn’t just choosing the thousand things you weren’t asked to do over your duty that’s wrong. It’s that saying “Not right now” isn’t an appropriate response to God. Just as I can delay my children’s requests, but they don’t have the authority to choose when they carry out their duties (unless I allow it), so do we as children of God have the obligation to respond to his call when we hear it. 

And Jesus actually said that. When he called some men to be his disciples, we know that the Apostles dropped what they were doing and followed him. But others made excuses to delay: first, let me bury my father. First, let me say goodbye to my family. And these are good things to do. But what Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom..no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom.” (Luke 9:57-62). 

Delayed obedience is disobedience. To be clear, there are mitigating circumstances. In my case, there was a lot going on that made things murky and difficult to discern. But that still doesn’t negate the fact that when Jesus calls, the call is for right now. Delayed obedience is disobedience. 

That is tough news for me, but I am here now, ready to cling to the parable about the workers who entered the vineyard late, but still received the same reward (Matt 20:1-16), and the one about the son who told his father he wouldn’t work, but then turned around and did his father’s will (Matt 21:28-31). 

Even now, it might be the case that I am still not fully following Jesus’s call for me. I do not know for certain, and if I did know for certain, there would be room for faith. 

So to close, I will share with you one of my favorite prayers, particularly for times like these. It is a prayer by Thomas Merton: 

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,

though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though
I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Amen

Your Motherhood Matters

“And how has it happened to me, that the mother of my Lord would come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby leaped in my womb for joy.”

– Luke 1:43-45

“Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.”

– Revelations 12:17

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“Mom, how big am I?” my son bounces on his heels, eagerly awaiting my answer.

“What do you mean, honey?” I ask. I am slow to look up from my reading, so I miss his gesture towards the wall. 

“I mean, how much do I weigh?” he asks. 

“We’ll have to go upstairs and see,” I reply, thinking of the digital scale in my bathroom. 

“NO!” he replies with uncharacteristic force for my usually mellow 5-year-old. “You know,” he says with a meaningful look, and this time I follow where he is pointing. 

He wants to know how much he weighs, according to the measure on the wall, where on each of their birthdays, we make little pencil marks to show how tall our children are, so that they can see how much they’ve grown each year. 

He’s asking how much he weighs, but that isn’t really what he means. 

One question that people are asking all over the internet these days has to do with the value of motherhood, thanks to a certain viral speech on a college campus somewhere in the middle of our country.

The reflection I have for you today is not a hot take on the merits or faults of that speech. This isn’t going to be a relative weighing of the value of stay at home motherhood or the permissibility of mothers pursuing paid work or passions outside the home. 

This is simply a reminder from one mother to another, on the Feast of the Visitation, that your motherhood matters. 

Because one thing that speech got right is that motherhood, in the last several decades, is under attack. We hear in Revelations that the dragon is enraged at the woman – that is, Mary - and is waging war against her offspring. We know that women have been a central battleground over the last century. We know these wounds. We know the political talking points. 

We know the voice that lurks in the darkness and whispers words that weigh on us, filling us with guilt and despair – guilt for choosing motherhood and, or guilt for not contributing enough to the world. It wants to wreck us, whichever choice we make, and we lash out and scapegoat whoever has chosen differently than ourselves. We know it all. 

But do we know just how important our motherhood is? 

It’s easy to forget, whether you’ve left a career full of accolades or are still accruing those accomplishments. Either way, the daily tasks of motherhood are mundane, thankless, unfulfilling. 

We do dishes. We prepare meals. We fold laundry. We sweep up crumbs. And whether we bake sourdough from scratch or slap some Wonderbread on the table, there really isn’t a lot of glamor in this job description.  

Sure, we can coordinate calendars with the skill of an executive assistant and plan perfectly proportioned meals to nourish our children. We become experts in removing blood stains, toy rotations, and cutting off crusts. Some of us can even fold a fitted sheet. Motherhood is challenging, and forces us to develop skills we feel are beyond us. I’m still working on those fitted sheets. 

Like I said, the tasks that make up our everyday are not glamorous. When I left work to stay home with our kids, my husband would come home every day and ask me one dreaded question: “What did you do today?” 

I hated answering that question. When I was working, that question might have any number of interesting answers. I might have had a meaningful conversation with a student or gotten some nice comment from my boss. I might have gone toe to toe with a parent or come up with a brilliant idea of how to teach a difficult concept. 

As a stay at home mom to two littles, my answers weren’t worth repeating. I got that jam out of the couch. I changed out of clothes covered in spit up. We played with Barbies while the baby inched his way across the carpet. 

My frustration with that question and our inability to appreciate the value of motherhood have the same problem as my son wanting to weigh himself by the marks on the wall: they use the wrong measure. 

My son won’t learn his weight from the wall, and we will never understand the meaning of motherhood when we try to account for it by any of the world’s measures. Not productivity. Not economics. Not statistics on good outcomes for mothers who adhered to any particular type of work related performance or abstinence. 

The immeasurable and intangible meaning of motherhood cannot be captured by a checklist. 

Mothering children is a divinely-appointed vocation, one in which the souls of our children have been entrusted to us to raise. The effects of motherhood are not inconsequential, but have eternal significance that few employment opportunities can hope to provide. 

Cardinal Josef Mindzety phrases it like this: 

“The most important person on earth is a mother. She cannot claim the honor of having built Notre Dame Cathedral. She need not. She has built something more magnificent than any cathedral – a dwelling for an immortal soul, the tiny perfection of her baby’s body. . . The angels have not been blessed with such a grace. They cannot share in God’s creative miracle to bring new saints to Heaven. Only a human mother can. Mothers are closer to God the Creator than any other creature; God joins forces with mothers in performing this act of creation… What on God’s good earth is more glorious than this: to be a mother?”

And if you don’t believe the good cardinal, ask yourself who has been the most important woman in all of history. Who is the most powerful? The most influential? Whose work during her earthly days has not only moved our world, but ripples into eternity? 

The answer, of course, is the woman God crowned Queen of Heaven and Earth, his mother. 

And yet if we reflect on Mary’s daily tasks, we will find that they were not much different than our own – even if she did not yet have to contend with fitted sheets. She washed dishes. She prepared meals. She folded laundry, swept up crumbs, and made bread.

And as the mother of God, she even made the bread that comes down from Heaven. Her days were filled with snuggles and storytelling. She taught him to pray and introduced him to the community. 

Mary practiced by example what her son would later advise: “If you wish to become great, you must become the servant of all,” (Matt. 20:26). 

The greatest Woman on earth spent her days cooking meals for her husband and washing her son’s clothing. Why should we desire anything different? 

God has given us souls to steward, and no measure on earth can tell us what that is worth. 

When people say you are “just a mom,” turn the other cheek. Don't cast your pearls before swine. Those who would have us believe our time with our children is worth less than our paycheck, or who see hopping off the ladder as a death wish rather than a great leap of faith will spend their lives chasing dust and ashes. 

When they accuse us of wasting our potential, let us not take offense. Thomas Merton said only the false self is ever offended. We should look on those who see motherhood as a pitstop or an impediment to what really matters with the gaze of Jesus who looked upon the lost with hesed, sometimes translated as pity, loving kindness, or mercy. They are sheep without a shepherd. 

It is our job to be salt and light. Beggars showing the other beggars where to find food. 

Motherhood is littleness. Motherhood is servanthood. And motherhood is monumental – by every measure that matters.

Our THEMED Toddler and Preschool Busy Bins

Ah, the seemingly-eternal question: how to keep toddlers and preschoolers occupied during the big kids’ school time?

That is worth of a post in itself.

Here, you’ll find recipes with ingredients for themed busy bins, designed to be low-mess, independent, and engaging for those little hands and minds. Each has sensory, fine motor, building, and creative components and can be rotated on a daily basis to keep each activity fresh and exciting for your little one.

They don’t need to be themed (I just find buying to be easier and more fun this way), and if your little one enjoys some activities more than others, feel free to lean heavier on his interests!

Please let me know how you enjoy these! We have been having a blast so far. (Amazon links are affliliate links, so if you do purchase via these links, it’s like sending me a “thank-you for the idea” tip, at no extra cost to you.)

For each of these, I purchase and label a scrapbox bin for storing the items. I get mine for $5 on sale at Michael’s, but these Amazon options also work well. If a book doesn’t fit, I just store it on top of the bin, and if an activity has just too many pieces, I store just enough to keep those little hands moving in a little bag inside the box. The rest of the set goes into one of our regular play spaces for other times of the day.

FARM
Sensory: Bean bin with Montessori tools
Fine-motor: Melissa and Doug Hide and Seek Wooden Farm
Building: Duplo At the Farm Set
Creativity: Melissa and Doug Farm Water WOW
Puzzles: Melissa and Doug Cube Puzzle, Melissa and Doug Chunky Puzzle
Book: Melissa and Doug Poke a Dot Farm

OCEAN
Sensory: Kinetic Sand with Ocean Molds
Fine-motor: Learning Locks
Building: Plus Plus Ocean Creatures
Creativity: Melissa and Doug Ocean Water WOW, Crayola Color Wonder Magic Light “Watercolor”
Puzzle: Melissa and Doug Fishing Puzzle
Book: Peek-a-Flap Ocean

BEARS/FOREST
Sensory: Play Dough Fun Set
Fine-motor: Lauri animal foam and peg stackers, Lincoln Logs
Building: Magnatile Forest Animals
Creativity: Color Wonder Alpha Pets
Puzzle: Melissa and Doug Wooden Bear Family Dress-up
Book: Peek-a-Flap WHO

DINOSAURS
Sensory: Colored Rice and Dino Figures
Fine-motor: Skillmatics Foil Fun Dinos
Building: Infantino Sensory Blocks
Creativity: Melissa and Doug Water WOW, Melissa and Doug Reusable Puffy stickers, Color Wonder Dinos
Puzzle: Melissa and Doug Chunky Puzzle
Book: The Ultimate Book of Dinosaurs

ICE CREAM RAINBOW
Sensory: Kinetic Sand Ice Cream Set, (also baking soda, vinegar, and food coloring in muffin tins with dropper to disperse the vinegar into tins filled with baking soda)
Fine-motor: Skillmatics Magnetic Alphabet Rainbow, Magnetic Ice Cream Color Matching
Building: Picasso Tiles, Magnetic Montessori Blocks
Creativity: Melissa and Doug Play Ice Cream Store (store the pieces only in the box), Ice-cream scented dot markers
Puzzle: Melissa and Doug Ice Cream Magnetic Puzzle Set
Book: Ice Cream: The Full Scoop by Gail Gibbons, Let’s Lace

JUNGLE/SAFARI
Sensory: Safari creatures, rice, and sensory scoops
Fine-motor: Geo-Board
Building: Learning Resources Tangrams/Pattern Blocks
Creativity: Melissa and Doug Reusable Puffy Stickers, Melissa and Doug Safari Puppets
Puzzle: Melissa and Doug Jungle Book/Puzzle, Melissa and Doug Safari Jigsaw
Book: Peek a Flap Zoo

LIFE CYCLES
Sensory/Fine Motor: Water play and Learning Resources Fine Motor Tool Set with Life Cycle Set
Building: Brain Flakes Building Set
Creativity: Crayola Color Wonder Stamp Set
Puzzle: 5-Layer Wooden Frog Puzzle
Book: DK How Does a Frog Grow Board Book, DK Life Cycles

CONSTRUCTION/VEHICLES
Sensory: Lentils and construction vehicles, Construction play sand set
Fine-motor: ImagiMake Shape Vehicle Puzzle, Skoolzy Nuts and Bolts
Building: Construction Magnatiles, Magnatile set (worth their weight in GOLD)
Creativity: Melissa and Doug Water WOW
Puzzle: Melissa and Doug Chunky Puzzle, Melissa and Doug Construction Jigsaw
Book: The Ultimate Book of Vehicles, Richard Scarry Busy Box Set, Melissa and Dog Poke a Dot Contruction

SPACE
Sensory: Pop tubes and space sensory bins
Fine-motor: Skillmatics “Dot It” Space Sticker Activity
Building: Kapla Planks, Space Duplos
Creativity: Melissa and Doug Water WOW, Paint by Sticker
Puzzle: Learning Resources Magnetic Solar System
Book: The Ultimate Book of Space

PRINCESS/CASTLE

Sensory: Little People Princess Set and dried peas OR Unicorn Sensory bin with kinetic sand
Fine-motor: Tea Party Set, Disney Princess Magnetic Dress Up
Building: Magnetic Castle, Magnetic Princess Blocks
Creativity: Play Scarves, Melissa and Doug Reusable Puffy Sticker Sets
Puzzle: Disney Princess Wooden Cube Puzzle, Minnie Mouse Mix and Match
Book: Beauty and the Beast Classic Pop-up